It’s time to turn a new page on learning. On iPad, textbooks invite Multi-Touch interaction — flick through photo galleries, rotate 3D objects, tap to pop up sidebars, or play video and audio. With iBooks, reading is beyond fundamental. And more engaging than ever.

Today’s students have grown up completely immersed in technology. iPad, iPod, computers — these are the ways they interact with their world. They need a textbook made for the way they learn.

iBooks textbooks on iPad offer a gorgeous, full-screen experience full of interactive diagrams, photos and videos. No longer limited to static pictures to illustrate the text, now students can dive into an image with interactive captions, rotate a 3D object or have the answer spring to life in a chapter review. They can flip through a book by simply sliding a finger along the bottom of the screen. Highlighting text, taking notes, searching for content and finding definitions in the glossary are just as easy. And with all their books on a single iPad, students will have no problem carrying them wherever they go.

Students can find these iBooks textbooks in the Textbooks section of iBooks. They can download a sample or purchase the entire book with one tap, for a fraction of the price of a paper textbook. Textbooks purchased from iBooks are immediately available on their bookshelf, right there alongside their other books. They can even get alerts when publishers update content, and download new updates to textbooks at no additional charge.Browse iBooks Textbooks

With the Multi-Touch magic of iBooks textbooks, interactive photo galleries bring images to life. Animations burst off the page. And 3D objects rotate with a swipe of a finger. See them in action

Readers can manipulate 3D objects with a touch — so instead of seeing a cross-section of a brain, they can see all sections. iBooks Author gives book creators the option to adjust the background, allow readers to rotate the object freely, or constrain its movement to horizontal or vertical rotation.

Pictures tell a bigger story when they’re interactive. Call-outs and pan-and-zoom features add even more to the experience.

Instead of seeing just one image on the page, readers can swipe through an entire collection of interactive photos and captions with their fingertips. They can navigate the gallery using photo thumbnails or step through images one at a time.

Now that students can truly interact with a textbook, they need a new kind of study aid: one that helps them take notes and review content as they read.

Use a finger as a highlighter when reading any textbook in iBooks. Just swipe over any text or mathematical expression and it’s highlighted. Tap a highlighted section and a palette appears. Change colours, switch to underlining or add a note instantly. Then switch to the Notes view to see all your notes and highlights organised in one place, making it a cinch to search or go back to the highlighted sections of the book.

All your notes and highlights automatically appear on study cards. Flip them over and find the definition of a glossary term or the note attached to the highlighted passage. Choose which highlight colours to review, and include chapter vocabulary from the glossary — automatically. To make sure you really know your stuff, you can shuffle your cards to study.

When it comes to studying, two minds are better than one. So when you come across a description of magnetostatics you can’t figure out, or a quote that supports your friend’s political studies paper, share the phrase directly from the page onto your Facebook wall or Twitter feed. You can also share a snippet via text or email.

Educators can include iBooks textbooks in the complete courses they create for iTunes U. And the textbooks work seamlessly with the iTunes U app for iPad. For example, students can tap the name of the book in the assignment list to start reading it straight away, and notes they take in iBooks will appear along with the other course notes in the iTunes U app.

With iBooks Author, a free app from the Mac App Store, anyone can make a book for iPad — complete with rich graphics, movies, photo galleries, maths expressions, Keynote animations, 3D objects and more.Learn more about iBooks Author